Many people were taken by surprise when trying out the Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 when it first came out.  It was buggy, and the main deal breaker for me was the fact that the Netflix ‘Watch Instantly’ feature didn’t work.  Not that its a feature I use everyday, but at times it just turns a laptop into a portable movie player, and in my application, my laptop sits next to my bed and acts as my movie player since I don’t have cable or a vcr/dvd player in that room.  Not only was it annoying not being able to use the service, but a quick google search showed me that uninstalling IE8 from Vista SP1 wasn’t going to happen (although if you’re upgrading to vista from XP SP3, you’re automatically downgraded to IE7 for the save).

I have been waiting for a fix and tonight I decided since I’m going on a cruise I wanted my netflix back.  I was prepared to factory restore my laptop (the unfortunate test victom).  I started googling, just in case I could find a way to force Netflix to work, or to force IE7 to overwrite IE8, and for some reason I opened the netflix page to test it one more time and Voila, the screenshot below shows it.  I got the standard, you need to install this plugin to use the service, it installed, tested my connection speed and the movie started instantly (Verizon dsl was in a good mood tonight).  So I guess if you’re like me, let the floodgates open and reinstall IE8 beta 2, it should allow you to watch your movies instantly with Netflix.  On the other hand, if you’re like me, you probably have Chrome as your default browser now and only use IE when you have to…Wow, when was the last time I used Firefox.

Netflix's Watch Instantly Feature Mysteriously Started to Work Again Today.